We are pleased to announce that Dr. Aysegul Gunduz has been selected to be this year’s recipient of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering (IAMBE/IFMBE) Early Career Award for the North America Region. The IFMBE/IAMBE Early Career Award (ECA) highlights the commitment of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering to support and encourage promising young researchers at an early stage in their career.

Gunduz’s research focuses on developing diagnostic and therapeutic tools and devices for neurological disorders. In particular, her research in neural engineering uses invasive brain recordings from neurosurgical patient populations. Given the high interest in mapping the human brain with the BRAIN Initiative, her work is very timely and part of an explosively growing area that is presenting substantial opportunities for exciting new scientific, engineering and translational research directions. For example, Dr. Gunduz and her team collect one of a kind data from patients with deep brain stimulation (DBS) implants across subcortical and cortical structures across both hemispheres. Although DBS has been successfully used for the treatment of movement disorders, data collection during recordings allows the study of the mechanisms that make DBS effective. This understanding will allow individualized therapies for each patient and disorder. Direct access to the human brain and the significance of the work make this area of research one of the most promising areas in human neuroscience of the present.

The J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering at UF strives to improve the human condition through creative merging of engineering with biology and medicine, and Dr. Gunduz’s research does exactly this. In particular, there is a university plan to build up neural engineering as one of the key strengths on campus and to couple neural engineering to existing nationally-recognized programs in neuroscience in UF’s McKnight Brain Institute, the Brain Rehabilitation Center of the Malcolm Randall VA Medical Center, and with the College of Medicine. Dr. Gunduz is an integral component of this campus-wide neural engineering effort and to our department.

The IFMBE/IAMBE Early Career Award will be presented to Dr. Gunduz at the IFMBE World Congress in Toronto on June 8th, 2015.

Congratulations, Dr. Gunduz!